Ironpaw Tokens & Cooking Materials Shuffling

Ironpaw Token Shuffle - Veggies, Meat & Fish

Over the last few weeks, I've been talking about making gold with cooking materials & fishing quite a bit here. That's because right now, it's about the only thing I'm really doing in game alongside dailies & some leveling! About 2 weeks ago, I did a post about how to make easy gold with Pandaren Cooking & in the comments it was pointed out to me that I missed an obvious trick! I edited the post at the time but it also got me thinking a little clearer about this whole Ironpaw Token Shuffle.

I went back to The Undermine Journal, to the Cooking section under the Gathered category & just stared at it a while. I realised that for me, at least, it didn't go far enough so I built another little spreadsheet for that extra step. This screenshot (from The Undermine Journal) shows how much it would cost to make a container of meats/fish or vegetables from each material available on the Auction House. In effect, it's the cost of an Ironpaw Token, dependant on which raw material you use. I've included the 100 Year Soy Sauce & Black pepper section because those are still selling well on my server & from this screenshot, you can easily see that there is profit to be made just by converting the cheapest raw materials to Ironpaw Tokens.

The Undermine Journal, Cooking page, Ironpaw Token Calcs

But what if you don't want to sell 100 Year Soy Sauce or Black Pepper? What if you need cheap materials to level your cooking Ways? Out comes the calculator to work out whether those 20 cheap Redbelly Mandarin are actually cheaper than 5 Raw Crocolisk Belly via an Ironpaw Token or should you just buy the Raw Crocolisk Bellies? (Just in case you don't know, 20 x  a meat or fish or 100 x a vegetable can be converted to an Ironpaw Token which in turn can be exchanged for 5 x a meat/fish bundle or 25 x a vegetable bundle)

That's where my spreadsheet comes in. I wanted to put some clever gizmos in there to make it even easier but my spreadsheet skills are extremely rusty & I just couldn't get my head around it! So I took the basic Undermine Journal data (columns C & D) to start with - this is just the same data as the screenshot earlier. Then I took the Container Cost & divided it by either 5 or 25 (meat/fish or vegetables) for columns E & F.

Calculate Ironpaw Token Shuffle Costs

So what does this actually do for me that I can't do quickly in game? For me, it quickly identifies which raw materials to buy to shuffle to the other materials I require. Currently I need Giant Mantis Shrimp but at 34g80s each, I don't want to buy them directly. My spreadsheet shows me that even if I use 100 Pink Turnips to convert to an Ironpaw Token & then buy 5 Giant Mantis Shrimp, I will save 42 gold! (purple dots).

It's going to be fairly rare for 100 vegetables of any sort to be a cost effective way of buying just 5 meat or fish - Giant Mantis Shrimp are just exceptionally expensive on my server today but using a single 20 stack of meat or fish can easily be cost effective to buy either 5 meat/fish bundle or a 25 vegetable bundle.

You can see that the Raw Turtle Meat & the Reef Octopus (red dots) are both really cheap today & in column F, it shows them at a converted price of 1g66s & 1g59s respectively - that means using either of these to buy a vegetable bundle (25's) will be the cheapest way to buy any of the vegetables except Pink Turnips & Mogu Pumpkins. The Reef Octopus is so cheap today that it's also the cheapest way to buy Wildfowl Breast, Raw Crocolisk Meat & Raw Crab Meat as well as all the fish below Jewel Danio in the fish section!

I've added this spreadsheet onto Google Docs & fingers crossed, in an editable, downloadable form. Just click Ironpaw Token Conversion spreadsheet and you should go straight to it. Feel free to edit it to suit yourself but please, only edit a downloaded copy. I tried to put a macro in for easy sorting but it didn't work (or I couldn't make it work!) so don't worry if you get a 'contains a macro' warning - I couldn't find it to get rid of it!

I hope this helps make the Ironpaw Token Shuffle a little easier & quicker for you. If you have any problems downloading or editing it, let me know either in comments, by email (top right under profile) or on Twitter @NevAHAddict & I'll do my best to help.

Edited: I had to change to Google Docs link above to return the file to it's original format. Please, please, download a copy before you edit anything. Thank you :)

Edited yet again! Following some feedback, I've extended this spreadsheet & uploaded a version 2 to google docs - I've also added some more analysis in a second post Ironpaw Tokens & Cooking Materials Shuffling - Revisited so to make sure you've got the most up to date version, pop over to the Revisited post & click the google docs link there :)


Image © USDAGov under Creative Commons licence